Call the fire department when if your house is on fire? Or your cat stuck in a lil’ tree?

Check out books from a public library?

Get your license renewed at the DMV?

Basked in the glory of clean floors and empty trashcans at the statehouse?

Used a Pell Grant to help pay for your degree at Fiscal Idiot State?

Watch the busted water main in front of your house get fixed?

Frolick in your favorite city park?

Do you, or will you, get a social security check in the mail?

Benefit from one of hundreds of other city, state, and federal services?

Yeah.

Thought so.

So next time you whine about losing all your hard earned money to those pork-barrel feds, remember that it’s not actually your money. It’s money you owe. You are paying for a variety of services you use everyday and for some reason feel entitled to have without supporting them monetarily so that they can function. I’m not naive enough to suggest that you benefit from every federally or state funded program — you don’t. But for every program out there that you either don’t believe in or don’t make use of, there’s another person out there who makes no use of a program that serves you. It’s called being a citizen. It’s called contributing a the greater good — a greater good that serves you every day in one way or another.

What really amuses me is that it’s the same people who decry taxes to pay for every day services that call programs like health care and welfare entitlement programs. Meanwhile, they don’t want to pay to support the services they use every day. Now that’s entitlement.